The Dignity of our Baptisms

First of all, an update - my previous post on Catholicism in Ireland has been published! After I published the post, I shortened it to fit the word limit for The Irish Catholic's letters to the editor section and submitted it by e-mail. In the most recent issue, they printed my letter, complete with my Irish hometown and county and the title "Renewing the Church." Thanks for supporting me to the point where I could confidently send my thoughts in and have them published in a national paper!
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Recently at Clonard, we've been having evenings of conversation with adults from the parish that are dedicated to offering some input on some central issues to living one's faith today. We've offered some simple input on issues that are not specifically doctrinal or dogmatic but rather elements of the faith we can try to live. We based our presentations on teachings of the church and tried to aim our remarks toward practical ends.

We covered liturgy, living Eucharistically, the universal call to holiness, living like Christ and understanding the idea of there being other Christs, and embracing and understanding Confirmation as one's personal commitment to the answer the baptismal call. Our final night was yesterday, and our more open, conversational format took us through some intriguing dialogues.

We talked about confronting pain, suffering, and life's challenges. We talked about disagreeing with the Church and the harshness or softness (depending on who you ask) of the Church. Perhaps most interesting, though, was our discussion of priests. We had a person claiming that priests should be seen as very special while a priest tried to explain that he isn't that special.

Casting aside the way I just totally oversimplified a fascinating discussion into a reductive sentence, the great moment came when a sister from our parish brought the conversation to the important point. The dialogue was showing me that one side felt priests were to be deeply revered and almost set apart while the other side sought to bring priests back toward the level of the laity a bit. The voice of reason came from our sister who grounded us in the profound dignity we all have from our baptism.

The priest is formed and ordained to perform the sacraments and be our spiritual leader, but he is simply responding to the scope of the call he received from God to put his gifts to use to meet the needs of the world. Meanwhile, the lay people are similarly responding to the scope of their calls by being bankers, teachers, secretaries, and pursuing careers that allow their own gifts to meet the needs of the world.

The workplaces may differ; the elements of the jobs' tasks my differ. However, every baptized person needs to answer their call to holiness by remembering their baptismal call. We are grounded in the idea that we are part of something bigger, of someone bigger - the God who became man, gave us the ideal for loving and serving by living it, and left us Himself in the Eucharist and the Church.

We are all baptized into the royal priesthood. While only some become priests or religious, all of us are called to a priesthood. We are all called to be priests in as much as we minister to others, serving others in the awareness that our baptism has anointed us with the call to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to give of ourselves to others in the example of Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection we are baptized into.

The Church struggles when only a small percentage of its members are answering their calls. If only a few people are living out their baptismal call - the priest in his preaching, sacramental duties, and leadership; the pastoral staff in organizing and training lectors, EMs, acolytes, and ministers of hospitality; those ministers serving those roles; the directors and musicians leading the music; the people leading parish social clubs and local service organizations - then we are left with a Church that is incomplete. Priests and liturgical ministers cannot be the only ones answering their calls. We then become a people made whole in Christ but a people that does not realize its full potential.

Every person who passes through the waters of baptism into Christ is anointed to be a priest in His name. No matter what social class or salary, career or lifestyle, hobbies and interests, or state of life one is in, every baptized Christian has been sealed with the Christian name by which God knows and calls them and loves them. What if we only recognized the dignity and tremendous hope that God places in us in this baptism?

Catholicism in Ireland as I See it Now

Having been in Ireland for almost six weeks, early impressions of the country and of the Church here are starting to crystallize into larger patterns and perceptions in my mindset.

Beyond the interactions with people from our choirs and those we see around the parish, I've really enjoyed grabbing a copy from the stack of newspapers in our parish lobby. The Irish Catholic is a really great weekly edition that turns up on the table outside the sacristy for me to enjoy.

The newspaper is long and not short on quantity of stories. A healthy blend of columnists, national reporters, and local reporters combine to create a newspaper full of stories long and short, micro and macro, opinion and fact.

One of the repeated features has been a two-page spread in the middle, profiling two opposing national journalists' opinions as told to a reporter in separate interviews - the question: is the Irish media biased against Catholics and the Church?

The answers have been largely what you'd expect but given from a perspective of professional legitimacy and experience. This week's responders gave some typical insights but with some new tilt. The man defending the media championed the watchdog element of journalists, not giving free passes or deference to the Church. The fellow criticizing the media put a new spin on "don't shoot the messenger," suggesting that this phrase implies the messenger just passively relays something true and discovered; he suggests not using this phrase for the media, since the media constantly makes decisions about what to pursue, what to report, how to report it, etc.

The long and short of it is that different people will give you different answers, and no consensus will really emerge I don't think. The Irish Catholic does a wonderful job of pursuing a variety of stories relevant to Catholics, from health and family to politics to ministry, but at the end of the day, they're overtly Catholic in their reporting. They give a lot of stuff at face value, but their evaluation of the information and columns are building the Kingdom, as they should - good for them for providing Catholics a good periodical. I'm certainly a grateful reader.

What I'm starting to learn from readings here and on RTE online and from conversations and perceptions is a view of the Church that is pervasive. Whether among Catholics who've lapsed or shrunk away or among non-Catholics or even non-Christians and seculars, the feeling I get is that the Irish people are ready and eagerly desiring Catholicism to fall away into a societal niche.

It seems on a national level that, regardless of the rhetoric or precision of his words, PM Enda Kenny's summer speech against the Church in light of governmental investigations was welcomed by the people. The country seems to embrace a pushback against a Church that has enjoyed such entitlement, if not institutionally/formally but certainly socially, personally, and culturally.

I don't think I'd go so far as to say that people want the Church to disappear or for Catholicism to shrink. It just appears that people wouldn't mind it stepping off to the sidelines and becoming more of a bit part than a lead actor.

A small thing in the defender's response in the two-page feature tipped me off to something - he described himself as an Irish Catholic agnostic. Beside the fact that this is an impossible thing to be, it demonstrates a growing viewpoint: Irish Catholic is no longer a flavor of Catholic devotion; rather, it is a secular, everyday classification that people put on without a desire to add to it a depth of lived faith, lifestyle, or outlook. It exists now more so as a modifier to a classification.

The Church as it stands seems destined to remain a large body but one where a few people carry the burdens of upkeep, outreach, and ministry while the vast sum desire to baptize and confirm their kids at least, or at most, pop in and out of Sunday mass before the inner community can subsume them and invite them personally to become active in some way.

This all in the larger picture of the country wanting the Catholic Church to become more like a charity or benevolent social organization, fading from its place as a prevalent institution in the national landscape to the boy who has taken his punishment, learned his lesson, and sits quietly in class, trying to answer questions correctly now and then, offering a meek helping hand, and trying not to make trouble.

This is not meant to incriminate the Irish Church or its Catholics or to imply that the Church in America is above these problems. The same push-and-pull plagues America, a nation founded on Protestant Christianity that aims to be affirming of a watery, civil, deist, vaguely Christian civil religion that embraces plurality and tolerance. And our parishes are full of inner/outer dichotomies, parishes that struggle to bridge the gaps between twice-a-year-church-goers, in-and-out Catholics, and the ones who decide to dedicate themselves more fully to faith in community.

The challenge for us - American Catholic volunteers living among this Church - is to figure out what ways, if any, we can draw upon our sensibilities to guide the Church into its rightful place in society. Pope Benedict XVI recently suggested secularism can do some good for the Church inasmuch as it helps to purify the Church of its overly worldly ties - cozying up with government preferences, taking advantage of taxes to name a few.

At the end of the day, the best renewal comes from people choosing lives of faith in the Church out of their own freedom. So the general solution is to work with the people already involved people in Church life to try to provide welcoming opportunities to the people in the heart of the community as well as those on the fringes.

In this vein, in a concrete way, tonight we are starting a three-evening sequence of "Conversations on Being Christian Today - Adult Faith Formation" (or at we've been calling it CoBCT-AFF). We're rolling a simple intro question into simple presentations into group sharing and some prayer to give adults a simple but hopefully useful venue to plug back into exploring their faith, knowing that some or many may not have done much since their own confirmation except baptizing their own children. We'll cover vocation (universal/baptismal call to holiness), liturgy, and tough stuff (problem of pain and so on). We may not get tons of people to come or much participation from those who do show, but our aim is to have prepared and offered it faithfully to give the people in our community a chance.

So if the Church is destined to fall out of the default Irish perspective and assume a place characterized more as peripheral or one in a chorus of moral, charitable, or spiritual voices, let's hope that the committed lay people and the steadfast Irish clergy can speak the heart of the Gospel in their lived faith and help to rebuild the Catholic image not through savvy PR or rhetorical tactics but through humble self-offering.

I'm not rendering a verdict that this change is bad or good or even that I've made a mostly accurate assessment. The role of society and family in cultivating an atmosphere based on Christian values, morals, and faith that it has found to be life-giving remains paramount, but I will say that embracing a culture where spirituality, Christianity, Catholicism, and our Church are embraced freely is a good thing. Though the culturally foundational place of Catholicism is a beautiful thing and an integral part of Catholic (and I'd hope Irish) Tradition, an environment where people choose Christ freely is beautiful. I'd hate for the Church to shrink or contract, but I welcome an increase in the likelihood that people's Catholic faith can come from their decision to live out the things began at their baptism and affirmed in their confirmation.